Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 13:40:39 04/24/00
I am not quite sure what drives this sort of discussion, but I would like to suggest a few things to reduce traffic on CCC: 1. If you don't like Crafty, don't use it. 2. If you do like Crafty, use it, but use it 'quietly' and avoid posting results here. That only serves to incite those that don't like Crafty to higher levels. 3. If you want to complain about things that Crafty doesn't do well when compared to commercial programs, then by all means _write_ _your_ _own_ program, and write it in such a way that it doesn't do the things you dislike. It is far easier to 'put down' than to 'roll your own'. 4. If you want to point out things that Crafty does well when compared to commercial programs, then see #2 above. The crafty-lovers aren't going to convince the crafty-haters of anything. The crafty-haters are not going to convince the crafty-lovers of anything. The discussions simply drag on and on without ever solving a thing. If you have a program you know can throttle Crafty easily, drop by ICC or FICS or chess.net and demonstrate its ability. Crafty is playing on all three servers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using identical hardware/book/tablebases and configurations. We have just reached a milestone on our ftp site, which I discovered about a week ago. If you take every hostname that has ever downloaded a copy of crafty (I am only counting crafty downloads not tablebase downloads which might be for other programs of course), extract the hostnames, remove duplicates, the count is now over 500,000. An amazing number. And that counts about a dozen major ISP's as one site each (ie aol.com has a few hosts, each host looks like one download site when in fact, it could be hundreds of different users.) The point of that is that there are plenty of people that are interested in using the program, interested in helping make it better, or interested in suggesting new features which I have included whenever there is time and the feature is reasonable. The 'negative' discussions don't change my mind about what I am doing, so they are effectively pointless. I would personally like to see CCC have much more about 'computer chess' and much less about "crafty is ....". It is somewhat out of control, IMHO, and is serving no useful purpose of any kind... Just an opinion of course, as always...
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